Past 24 hours has been refreshing, at least for my circle of friends. Players I have not seen in months have started to trickle back, and our fleet actually had activity in it for more than a few hours.
The CTD (Crash-to-desktop) issue in CCA has not been an issue at least for me; I was impacted by this on a daily basis, and as of this morning I’ve completed 18 CCA’s without a single crash. Stealth patch? Code change with unintended good consequences? Cosmic Karma realignment?
I was also pleasantly surprised to see the queue rates in Crystalline Cataclysm hit pre-DR queue numbers. DR’s launch had frustrated many with the overwhelming changes, to progression, upgrade costs and difficulty.
Sunday:
It was nice to see calls in most channels to fill a CC happen in seconds. A quick check of all queues already in progress was over 7K players – double what we would have seen in the past month. Steam numbers continue to be underwhelming, but this is likely do to more with players switching to the ARC launcher than actual players still using ARC.
Conversations with the Lootcritter 
Am I missing out on anything by using Steam? I keep up with news via twitter/reddit/forums.
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Cryptic is trying to move away from Steam as a launch platform. Zen purchases through steam (if they still work at all) are often flagged preventing you from using them – or – they bind what you purchase to your account as a security measure against fraud. It’s a pain in the ass that’s impacted more than a few players.
Part of that is a business move on PW’s part. It’s not so much as ‘bad’, as it is inconvenient.
In terms of tracking player trends (number of active players, time spent in-game) players often misread STEAM ranking as a view on how STO is doing. It’s inaccurate as it doesn’t represent the total number of players, only a shrinking percentage. Raptr on the other hand is more accurate as we know their market share (video cards) and can extrapolate with ‘some’ accuracy.
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